How to implement:
• Analyze existing traditions. Look at existing traditions that you have in your family, workplace, or community. Are they still positively serving their purpose? How can they be changed or altered to bring about a more meaningful experience for all involved?
• Brainstorm new ones. Are there new opportunities to create impactful traditions in your group? Are there events that need celebrating or milestones that deserve to be honored? How can you make these new traditions meaningful and impactful?
Often in our communities we set out to solve pain points that people are feeling or provide value to help people achieve something in their lives. Think about centering traditions around intentional moments, milestones, or collective days of celebration or reflection.
Traditions can create intentional intersection points that bring us back together and give us something to look forward to as we live in community with one another.
Takeaway questions:
• What traditions hold the most meaning for us in our homes, workplaces, and communities? Why do they have significance?
• Are there traditions that would be meaningful to start this year and continue into the future?
• Are there traditions that are no longer serving our gatherings that should be left behind in the pursuit of intentionally cultivating connection?
BUILDING COMMUNITY, TOGETHER
When a company lives by its mission, vision, and values, it can create so much more than a profitable business—it can truly form a family.
In the fall of 2015, we received an email out of the blue from a company called HoneyBook, a client management software. Their cofounders invited the Rising Tide team out to San Francisco to host our first gathering in the city.
We boarded a plane, flew out to California, and gathered around a table for lunch. Sitting together in a back room of the office, overlooking a shaded side street in the warehouse district of San Francisco, HoneyBook’s CEO Oz Alon sat directly across from me over a plate of sushi.
He began to talk about his vision for the creative economy. I was captivated. Within minutes, we were all finishing each other’s sentences.
We talked about how creative entrepreneurship was the future of work. How we believed in a matter of decades, technology would shift our economic infrastructure and start a modern industrial revolution… Oh! And it would be the creative ones: small-business owners, innovators, artists, and freelancers who led humanity into the future of work.
In order to support them, we all agreed that they needed two things:
1. The ability to focus on and invest in their superpowers (their craft, the thing that they were created to do and loved doing).
2. A community to support them through the challenges that lie ahead.
HoneyBook had set out to solve the first need, and Rising Tide had set out to solve the second. They were building technology. We were cultivating community.
They were fighting to free creatives and entrepreneurs from the manual processes involved in business management. We were fighting for belonging in a broken system—disrupting the way small businesses saw one another as competitors through cultivating impactful local communities.
We had slightly different missions; however, we shared the same vision. We both desired a reality where all people could build a life on passion and purpose. We both hoped for a world where creativity and entrepreneurship collided to lead us into the future.
What solidified our partnership, however, was what Oz shared next. Framed on the walls of that San Francisco office were HoneyBook’s core values:
People come first.
We go the extra mile.
We love what we do.
We are fearless.
We are family.
I could see that we shared a lot more than just our vision of the future. We also shared values. There is something remarkable about aligning on values—it clarifies the opportunities that exist to build something better, together.
Rising Tide and HoneyBook joined forces that week and have been together ever since. A partnership built on a hopeful vision of the future and a foundation of shared core values. The incredible years that followed have turned my HoneyBook coworkers into my extended family.
In half a decade, we’ve shared countless experiences as a team. We start every week by gathering together and end it precisely the same.
We have hosted Whiskey Wednesdays and hustled side by side during hackathons. We’ve drafted petitions, created hundreds of pages of content, raised thousands of dollars for charity, and hosted events for tens of thousands of people.
And in hard times, we’ve always operated much like a family.
During my extended recovery from brain surgery, my HoneyBook coworkers stood in steadfast support of me through each hurdle and hardship. They brought meals to my apartment. They took work off my plate. They checked in on me every single day until I was well enough to return to work.
When the coronavirus pandemic struck our community down, we fought tooth and nail to save it. We rallied behind the small businesses that we believe in so strongly. Our sales team converted into a crisis-response team—ceasing business as usual to call our members one by one and ask how we could support them. Our marketers switched gears and began creating legal and financial resources to protect our members. Our Rising Tide leaders hosted town-hall-style gatherings to support members on the ground.
When small businesses saw their livelihoods threatened overnight, I watched my company live by our values. Putting people before profit, we stopped selling and started serving. We united as a family and rose to the occasion, even when it caused harm to the bottom line.
The months following the onset of the pandemic were some of our most successful as a business. Our community rallied around us, and our members advocated for us—feeling a deep sense of connection to how we supported them in their time of need.
If core values are the backbone of belonging, then living by them in hard seasons becomes the heartbeat of your business. Companies and communities built up from core values will emerge from the darkness, time and time again—united by so much more, dedicated to something greater.
As you set out to create something of your own, please remember: Start with vision, mission, and values. Choose leaders with intention. Cultivate experiences that bring your group closer together. Building stronger communities, better companies, more deeply connected families can have a profound impact on our world as a whole.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
REJECTION AND REDEMPTION
A few years ago, I was speaking at an event in Washington, DC. It was my first time giving a talk of this magnitude alongside women I had looked up to for years. Frankly, I was terrified.
On the drive into the city, I recited my lines, running through my talk over and over again in my mind. I breathed in deeply, trying to replace the anxiety in my chest with sweet, sweet oxygen.
Get it together, Nat.
Walking into the auditorium, I noticed a few of the other speakers standing by the stage. I was intimidated. Do I just walk up and join them? Or do I hide backstage and continue to practice my presentation?
My hands were vibrating—clammy, jittery, like a downed power line after a thunderstorm.
My introverted tendencies got the best of me, and as I started to retreat, one of the women waved. Shoot. She saw me.
I wiped the sweat from my hands inside the pockets of my blazer and walked toward her by the side of the stage. We hugged and made small talk about the weather and the great turnout. A few others spotted us and joined the conversation. Our duo quickly became a huddle.
I recognized one of the women who walked up from years earlier. She was a photographer, like me, and we worked in a similar market. That’s when I noticed her tattoos. We had connected only online in the past, and therefore, I never knew she had tattoos. I had just gotten my first one a few months earlier, after years of working up the courage to do it.
I remember thinking how she was a hell of a lot braver than I was. Getting a tiny tattoo on my ankle had felt like the decision of a lifetime. I agonized over it for ages, so afraid of what other people might think, whether they would judge me. Why couldn’t I be more like her?
This girl was an absolute badass. I admired her guts.
Three years and what felt like a lifetime later, I was working late in our San Francisco office when I received a private message. It was the girl with the gorgeous tattoos, the photographer I’d met at a conference years prior.
We hadn’t spoken once since that day in the auditorium, and I was excited to see why she was reaching out. I went back into my DMs and opened her message. It was a long message—too long. I scrolled and scrolled to get to the top. Something was wrong.
It took her three years to write me this message, and from the very first line, I felt my stomach drop to my feet, then melt right through the floor, and continue plunging into the depths of the earth. No, no, no…
In her own words, she recounted the interaction that day in the auditorium in a way that vastly contrasted with my memory. My compliment, through her eyes, was veiled criticism. She thought I was asking her about her tattoos because I didn’t like tattoos and I was judging her for her choices. “You shattered my ‘amazing’ view of you. In a single moment I felt unworthy and critically judged,” she wrote.
Ouch. Every part of me wanted to reach through the phone and tell her that she misunderstood. Tears started welling in the corners of my eyes, and a familiar ache of shame washed over me.
As someone who had spent much of her life feeling like the misfit, battling the figurative and, at times, literal, mean girls, the thought that I could make anyone else feel that way was downright heartbreaking. I had walked into the auditorium that day feeling like red-haired Cady Heron on her first day of school in Mean Girls, anxious and out of place, but to another woman, I was Regina-freaking-George.
I felt the shame spiral coming on.…
How could she have thought I was judging her? Does she know that I also had a tattoo? She probably doesn’t. I failed to mention it in the anxiety-riddled awkwardness of our conversation. Did she sense my nerves as something else? Did my nervous face make it look like I was judging her? How could she think that I was intentionally being mean?
She spent three years holding on to the pain of that interaction before feeling ready to tell me how deeply her perception of our interaction had hurt her. The words of her direct message wrecked me. I could only imagine how it had felt for her to carry that all those years.
I immediately responded and apologized. I asked for her forgiveness—not because my intent was ever to hurt her, but simply because despite having good intentions, I inadvertently had.
By now you’ve probably learned enough about me to know that I would never intentionally do anything to make someone feel that way. For as many flaws as I have, working to help others feel a sense of belonging is what I have dedicated my life to. Striving to cultivate community and relationships as an imperfect leader means that oftentimes I fail in the pursuit of creating connection.
However, regardless of the fact that my intentions were genuine, my execution left her feeling completely the opposite. My words had hurt her. That was all that mattered.
REJECTION
I struggled with whether or not to share that story. Frankly, I struggled with whether or not to write a chapter about rejection in a book about belonging.
It felt uncomfortable. It still feels uncomfortable. No one wants to recount a time when they made someone else feel judged or unwelcome. No one wants to remember a time in their past when they felt that way too.
However, at one point or another in our lives we will either: (a) be rejected or (b) leave someone else feeling rejected.
As humans, we are imperfect beings. Even with pure intentions, we are capable of causing harm. Even when we strive to create spaces of belonging, we run the risk of doing the opposite.
Sometimes we cannot anticipate the way others will interpret even our best-intentioned efforts to connect. Likewise, sometimes we will be on the receiving end of negative interactions, and it can be difficult to move forward when you’ve been hurt in the context of community.
Let me be clear: I am the first person to admit that I have made enough mistakes in this arena to write an entirely separate book about it. Many community leaders would tell you the same thing. When you step up to serve, you’re bound to falter. However, with each misstep, we have an obligation to reflect, to learn, and to do better next time.
When we set out to create communities or engage in relationships, we must commit to being vulnerable. When we open our heart to the possibility of relationships, there is a chance that through that vulnerability, we will get hurt or that we will hurt someone else. I believe that the way we respond in these challenging situations is ultimately what defines our character.
Whenever I speak to groups of people about this subject, there is always someone who asks me about how to navigate negative past experiences in relationships. Feelings of rejection, competition, exclusion, and judgment are often in the top list of reasons someone is hesitant to commit to joining a community.
The same often applies to companies and organizations that leave employees feeling unsupported, unheard, and unappreciated. Negative feelings can fester and distrust can continue to follow us long after the initial damage is done.
When I talk about belonging and the importance of it, I am encouraging you to find or create healthy communities that work toward inclusion, respect, and empowering all members involved.
There are communities in this world that do not strive for those values. There are groups that embrace cultures of exclusion and divisiveness. There are organizations under unhealthy leadership that unite members through fear and anger rather than love and belonging. Avoid those spaces at all costs. A culture of exclusion anywhere is a threat to belonging everywhere.
However, as we all know, even in healthy communities where values are in alignment and all members are united by a shared purpose, negative experiences can arise. This is the nature of community. I’ve never seen a community where there hasn’t been at least one instance of conflict or discord.
Especially when the internet is involved—every controversial subject is a tinderbox simply waiting for a spark. Keyboards are used to wage war, and real human beings struggle to cope when they are caught in the crossfire.
So how do we navigate hard experiences with others in community settings to prevent them from pushing us further into social isolation? How do we address rejection? How do we nurture more inclusive and welcoming spaces? Let’s talk about it.
Communication is the key.
In setting out to foster welcoming communities, we must also proactively create a culture of open feedback and communication. This means intentionally fostering a spirit of openness about areas where we may be falling short or not living up to our aspired values.
In practice, this may look like giving and receiving feedback in real time and equipping leaders with the tools they need to facilitate these conversations well. Organizationally, this should include anonymous surveys that specifically address whether members feel as though they belong as well as facilitated feedback sessions with those who feel that there is room for improvement.
Welcoming, honoring, and intentionally responding to critical feedback sets the stage for dialogue that can truly change the direction of a company or community.
Likewise, in our personal relationships, this means that you must tell people when their words or actions hurt you.
Many of us have been socially conditioned to avoid directly addressing conflict. For example, I get a queasy feeling in my stomach when I
think about telling someone else that they have hurt my feelings. However, we need to challenge ourselves to speak up and be communicative in difficult situations. (We’ll discuss how to do this in just a bit.)
Choose the setting for communication wisely. Face-to-face is always preferred and prevents misinterpretations that often arise from reading written words without tone or eye contact. Rather than sending an email, consider hopping on the phone or getting together for coffee.
In an effort to seek resolution, avoid making assumptions about someone else’s intentions and approach the conversation from a place of empathy. Give people a chance to share their heart and, whenever possible, extend grace.
Listen and use empathy as a vehicle to move the conversation forward. Countless times in community, choosing to communicate has repaired broken relationships before the situation dissolves irreversibly. Being honest also creates new opportunities for growth.
Behaviors that create a false depiction of resolution and are not ideal include:
• Avoidance of the situation entirely
• Internalizing hurt to spare others’ feelings
• Modifying oneself in order to avoid future rejection
• Venting or gossiping about your experience with others
When you’ve been hurt… communicate early and often. Be direct. Be honest. Hold your ground and seek ways to repair the relationship when it is safe and possible to do so.
The process of healing begins when we are willing and encouraged to communicate how we feel and create an opportunity for others to commit to building something better together.
An open and honest practice of feedback, both in our communities and in our own relationships, can prevent instances of rejection from evolving into an overall culture of exclusion. Communication, especially in the context of difficult conversations, can transform the way we feel and engage with one another.
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